Mobile World Congress 2010: Smartphones Are The New Phones

February 25th, 2010

Ian Fogg

With contributors:

Thomas Husson , Mark Mulligan , Laura Wiramihardja , Charles Golvin

Summary

This year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) was truly global yet was much more than purely a mobile event. Three of the key smartphone players making waves this year — Google, Intel, and Microsoft — come from the North American Internet and PC world. Smartphones are no longer mere mobile plays but a core part of wider Internet and consumer electronics product strategies. Now that smartphones are becoming small and cheaper, two of the key barriers to their adoption are vanishing. Long live the "smart phone": Smartphones will in time become synonymous with the phone. And, as the pace of smartphone innovation continues — with solar-powered handsets, multitouch interfaces, and smartphone-software-powered tablets — innovation from smartphones will increasingly flow back onto the PC. As smartphones become smarter, they are increasingly delivering the whole Internet, not just a part of it. If anything, due to their location and 24x7 Social Computing capabilities, they will offer a superset of the PC Internet — not a subset.

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